The formation of efficient and inefficient social convention driven by conformity bias

Social conventions governs our social behavior in many ways, ranging from left- and right-hand traffic to a way of greeting. We sometimes find inefficient social conventions like bullying in a class are formed, where almost of the people in the group are at a disadvantage. Although such conventions can be disadvantageous for all the people in the group, why are those conventions formed and continue to be maintained? A conformity bias, behavioral tendency with which people take an action that a majority of the group take, can be one of key ingredients of this phenomena. In this study, we investigated the impact of the conformity bias to the formation of social convention with a multi-agent simulations. Analysing stationary states of the dynamics of the model, we found that the conformity bias can drive the formation of both of efficient and inefficient social convention depending on an extent of the bias.